from one codemonk to another

Yesterday it seems that HP bought Palm for 1.2 Billion dollars. I think it would be wise for HP to use Palm’s hardware instead of their own hardware, which has been less than awesome for quite a while. I would also not try to brand it iPaq. I think that HP may have paid too much for Palm, except that recently it seems that HP has been trying to design it’s own operating system for a few months now.

A friend suggested yesterday that Palm had bought Be a while back, but in reading further into it, it seems that BeOS is owned by a holding company called Access Co. At any rate, what I hope happens is that HP uses the webOS for some of their media devices.

It is interesting, to say the least, but I don’t know if HP operating Palm as anything other than Palm makes any sense. WebOS is interesting as well, but it really needs to track the chromium project more closely, maybe it is and I just don’t know, but much of the HTML 5 stuff doesn’t seem to be fleshed out really well.

I hear a lot of prognostication about who will buy Palm now that they are officially up for grabs. People are suggesting that HTC, Lenovo, or even Apple would be the most likely to buy them, however I don’t think any of them will get Palm. I think that Google will get Palm for around 1 billion dollars, and here is why.

Primarily, the main reason is that Palm’s WebOS falls directly in line with Google’s philosophy of web first, native second. That with the Google Native Client could make for a compelling addition to Android. One could argue that Android is lacking only in UI, and WebOS has a UI second only to the iPhone. Secondarily, buying Palm would give Google patent ammunition to use in assisting HTC in their legal battle with Apple, especially since it is Google’s Android OS that is causing the issue.

It doesn’t make sense for Apple to get Palm, even if they are in the bidding, because Google has shown in the past that it is willing to go way above a company’s valuation to snag them. This makes just too much sense so it has to happen, that is my prediction, it is sort of hopeful because I like WebOS and Palm, and would like to see it continue, albeit in a more pure HTML 5 sense.